There is a scene in a Hindi movie
that I remember. The suicidal hero talks about his previous love to a random
stranger he met on a train. She convinces him that he would feel better if he
took a photograph of his former love and burned it prior to flushing it down
the toilet. After draining the remnants of the photograph, said hero flashes a
brilliant smile and proclaims to the woman how fantastic that crazy act made
him feel. Watching that scene in that little house in Mysore, I never thought
that years later I would try to enact something equally ridiculous in real life
and the tragic unfunny outcomes it had.
Because when you are with someone
for the better part of a digital decade, you don’t just have a few photographs
conveniently placed with matchsticks adjacent for that burning ritual. You have
albums and photos strewn over a digital wasteland of Google albums, hard
drives, pen drives, phones and emails. And trust me, deleting a picture from a
computer, is not as satisfying as burning one up.
My digital clean-up was such an
extensive activity. It started off with me carefully selecting pictures of her
and us from albums and patiently deleting them to avoid loss of photos of
friends. However this sieve-through process had the additional disadvantage of
forcing me to relive those long-gone happy memories and watch the smiles, hugs,
laughter and happiness that seemingly dissipated from my life.
10 minutes of painstaking and
pain taking effort later, I told myself- screw it and then began the bulk
deleting process. Whole albums, folders, digital albums found themselves being
gobbled up by my digital recycle bin as I went on a virtual spring cleaning
session. Months later after all was said and done and the court finally snapped
all residual ties, I still kept finding images in places I least expected. In
my office laptop, in my computer at my home, synchronized Picasa albums in
phones. I kept deleting them, without a second thought as I feared the
consequences of ripping through the scabs of an ugly but healing wound.
Then in the month of December,
during a visit home, I came across a photo album in my cupboard.Blue with an
oval cut-out in front, to show a smiling happy and thinner me, the album lay in
the shelf. I opened the album to realize that this was the album of my 18th
birthday. Beside me was the woman who I adored and lovingly called my sister
and in front of me was the woman, who I didn't adore yet and I had no idea
would become my wife. Surrounding me, were friends - new ones and old who
joined in the celebration and force fed me buttery cake.
In each photo were friends and
loved ones, most of whom are not in touch with me any more. And in the midst of
it all was me enjoying what was a delightful birthday. I sat gazing at the
smiling visages, reliving that heavenly day aptly spent in a restaurant named
Ambrosia. It was a beautiful birthday and the 10 birthdays that have spanned
the decade in between had not yielded one with such beautiful memories. However
when I was done reminiscing over them, I couldn't make myself tear and throw it
all away.
Because It is really easy to
destroy and rip things apart and run away from things that hurt and it’s really
hard to find something you really care about to hold on to. Through my
overzealous action of erasing her from my life, I had wiped out the better
parts of a decade of my life. Gone with all the evidence of her, was
unfortunately the existence of me. Pictures of friends, loved ones and pets,
all now just reference points in the unreliable and ever fading repositories of
my brain.
I looked back at the last image
of me in that album. It had me posing, with a ridiculous cone shaped hat
outside the restaurant surrounded by friends and smiling with not a single care
in the world. By my side, she stood wiping her eye unaware that the photograph
was being clicked by the woman who few years later was forced to sever all ties
with me. I didn't know then that the woman by my side would marry me years
later. I didn't know then that that beautiful wedding would end as horribly as
it did. All I know now is that the smiling chap in the photo was happy and blissfully
unaware of all the machinations that were sent in motion. It was his innocence
that I wanted to hold on to, not having any left in my life. So I dusted that
blue album and returned it to its rightful place in my shelf.
